San Antonio Writing Project workshop, excellent event.

Written Saturday, posted Sunday 09-18-2011.

I got a chance today to attend a workshop on technology in the classroom, hosted by the San Antonio Writing Project. It was very good. The keynote speaker, Chris Navarro, seems to be a bit of a local Renaissance man and is co-running Open Art, an outfit which brings arts education to K-12 schools which can't afford to hire a full time art, music, or drama teacher (which is a lot of schools now given the way the tide is running). Link:

http://www.open2art.com/
He and the other presenters discussed using various programs to combine visuals, music, text, and voice-over to engage the students. A partial list of the programs they demonstrated or described:

Wikis -available thru various websites
Voicethread - upload any media type to the same account
Prezi - like ppt but cooler
Gimp - one I know pretty well already
Moviemaker - described as bearing the same relationship to real video editing programs that crayons have to other art supplies. Still, it's a place to start.
Glogster - ???
Comixpress and
Issuu - both involved in self-publishing, which isn't a bad thing any more
Audacity
Animoto
Evernote
Weebly
Various Google apps

Some of these are familiar to me, some not so much & some entirely new.

Other stuff. I found out about Joe Lambert's "Digital Storytelling" which I've ordered from Amazon. Andrew Eichstead, one of the presenters, spoke of the need to tell stories, using the online media - this keys in closely to points made in the textbook. Lambert has this site:
http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.pdf which I have not more than started but looks like a short version.

Also, I learned about Ian Jukes' blog, "The Committed Sardine" (don't ask me) at: 
http://www.committedsardine.com/blog.cfm
Looks like a good source for ideas about education, technology, and their evolving and not always pretty relationship.